


Hereafter

by mortalitasi



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Destroy. Garrus and Shepard return to the place where a lot of things began, and a very important one ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hereafter

The tide is coming in when he helps her out of the shuttle, blue and turquoise washing over rocks covered with hunter green, through shallows scuttling with little weird crabs that have too many legs and eyes in the wrong places. 

She stumbles once by the rocks, the bionic joints giving away from under her, but he’s there to shoulder her weight, all one hundred and sixty seven exhausted pounds of Shepard in an outfit that breaks uniform regulations and isn’t appropriate for the CO of the Alliance’s state-of-the-art warcraft— she looks different in just a white tee and denim capris. Different and tired, and just really goddamn ordinary.

He brushes some loose strands of reddish hair out of her face when she looks down at her new leg with a quiet sort of acceptance in her eyes, the type he’s seen in her so often he sometimes wishes it were criminal. Garrus Vakarian has come to realize that some of their worst enemies have been the ones that you can’t shoot with a gun, and it’s hard to keep them away— he can only do his best, like he’s been doing for the last three years. His best is all anyone can ask for, she’s said to him before. 

When you’ve stared a Reaper down point-blank and listened to the song of paleolithic leviathans scream out above the churning oceans of 2181 Despoina, helping your girlfriend sit down on a rock seems so stupidly easy a thing to do that it almost makes him want to cry. Well, he would, if turians could. 

She exhales loudly, wipes an imaginary veil from her face with one scarred hand, and takes a deep breath of the sea salt air. 

"Hasn’t changed a bit," she says, her words almost lost in the whoosh and drag of the waves on the sand. 

"Definitely not," he agrees, turning his eyes on the serene flatline of the azure horizon. 

Virmire still looks like paradise.

They stay there for a long while, her sitting on the rock and him standing beside her, hands linked, saying nothing, listening to the ebbing sigh of the tide between the pebbles and watching bizarre crustaceans skitter over the bone-white sand. Once or twice things that might be distant relatives to Earth’s variant of birds wheel overhead, their shrieks echoing over the water.

There are scary lulls in the quiet, times when they both let their thoughts drift and the difference between past and present hitches and catches and they’re convinced for a few unbelievable instants that they’re back where they started, and Captain Kirrahe’s team is waiting by the makeshift tents set up just a ways down the beach while the salarians nervously bustle around a krogan they don’t know how to handle. 

They’d been so young then— young and dumb and fumbly with no clue about what they were facing and with no tombstones to call a friend. Her hand tightens around his, but he doesn’t look. He knows she hates it whenever anyone sees her caught up like this.  

"We did it," she says through the thickness of tears, pressing her knuckles to one shut eye. He can hear the unspoken name there, the way he did three years ago when she sat against her locker in the armory with her face in her hands, her undershirt soaked through with saltwater and Virmire sand clinging to her boots. 

_What am I going to tell his parents?_

He lets the silence linger for a moment before his focus flickers to her leg. 

"The doctors are going to be pissed if you let that rust," he tells her, and she kicks up a splash in response. Yma smiles for the first time today and he feels even more relieved than he thought he would. 

"Fuck ‘em. They’re not the ones doing kiddy exercises on pavlova bars," she says, holding on firmly as she gets up, ignoring his advice to go steady. The metallic knee glints as she straightens herself.

"I think we call that ‘physiotherapy.’"

"Kiddy exercises."

"I don’t even know why I try."

Now she laughs and leans in for support. “Because you just can’t get enough.”

"I must be insane," he’s saying as she loops her arm through his.

"No one ever said we weren’t," she remarks, and now it’s his turn to laugh instead.

"Yeah." He lets his arm drift lower to hold her around the waist. "They haven’t."


End file.
